"ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) - Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That's because they've shown exactly how restricted calorie diets -- specifically in the form of restricted glucose -- help human cells live longer.

They found that the normal cells lived longer, and many of the precancerous cells died, when given less glucose. Gene activity was also measured under these same conditions. The reduced glucose caused normal cells to have a higher activity of the gene that dictates the level of telomerase, an enzyme that extends their lifespan and lower activity of a gene (p16) that slows their growth. Epigenetic effects (effects not due to gene mutations) were found to be a major cause in changing the activity of these genes as they reacted to decreased glucose levels.

"Western science is on the cusp of developing a pharmaceutical fountain of youth" said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "This study confirms that we are on the path to persuading human cells to let us to live longer, and perhaps cancer-free, lives.""

"Friday, December 18, 2009 Omega 3 Fatty Acid and Adiponectin Levels Today my wife was watching the Oprah show. A commercial came on and I looked up. It was a Christmas special on liposuction in the local area. Considering that the fat tissue (adipose tissue) is now viewed as an endocrine organ and not just a collection of fat cells, I have always thought that sucking out the fat cells maybe a bad idea. Yet, I have never seen proof of this. But, the science of the adipose tissue as an endocrine organ is relatively new. It seems that in the medical literature adiponectin is receiving the most attention from all of the other adipose hormones - or also referred to as adipokines. This is for good reason. As stated before, adiponectin has the following effects:

"Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered that restricting consumption of glucose, the most common dietary sugar, can extend the life of healthy human-lung cells and speed the death of precancerous human-lung cells, reducing cancer's spread and growth rate.

The research has wide-ranging potential in age-related science, including ways in which calorie-intake restriction can benefit longevity and help prevent diseases like cancer that have been linked to aging, said principal investigator Trygve Tollefsbol, Ph.D., D.O., a professor in the Department of Biology.

ScienceDaily (May 26, 2009) - A protein that plays a key role in tumor formation, oxygen metabolism and inflammation is involved in a pathway that extends lifespan by dietary restriction. The finding, which appears in the May 22, 2009 edition of the online journal PLoS Genetics, provides a new understanding of how dietary restriction contributes to longevity and cancer prevention and gives scientists new targets for developing and testing drugs that could extend the healthy years of life.

Calorie-restricted diets are thought to protect against cancer and slow tumor growth, and a new study published in this week's Nature begins to tease out why the measure works for some tumors, and not for others.

For almost a century, researchers have known that fasting helps animals live longer and avoid some cancers, "but which type of cancers would be amenable to this approach, from a therapeutic standpoint, is still an open question," said Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a cancer geneticist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Cancer Center in Boston, Mass., who was not involved in the study. The study is exciting because it is one of the first to start answering that question at the genetic level, he said.

Calorie Restriction Diet Plan is being promoted by many medical experts to maintain body weight and size. Calorie restriction diet seems to be one of the most popular diets and it seems to be backed up by great medical results. This is different from fads

Hara hatchi bu, the Okinawan people's habit of eating only till they are 80 percent full, is thought to be one of the secrets of their extraordinary health and longevity. In addition to one of the highest percentages of people in the world who live past 100, Okinawans appear to be less prone to heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

Indeed, ever since it was discovered in the 1930s that laboratory rats fed a caloric-restricted (CR) diet lived almost twice as long as their well fed counterparts, scientists have pursued caloric restriction research in the hopes of finding novel strategies for extending human life and preventing disease. Given the growing older population at risk for memory problems and the rising rates of obesity, the role of diet in maintaining peak brain performance has taken on added importance.